America: the facts

start of this century, and it seems reasonable to believe that many of the remaining third will go on to do so.”²¹⁷

Thanks to industrial development in the early twentieth century, cars stayed in the focus of technical research and thus the desire to own a car is as strong as that of owning a house. Cullen comments that car ownership, like home ownership, points to one more distinctively American trait: relative wealth.²¹⁸ In the States, except for big cities like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, there is very little by way of public transport, and therefore, cars are really a necessity. Moreover, cars are important in Americans’ daily life, not only because of their practical use, but also their social signification: “The automobile embodied personal mobility, and as such was the perfect complement for the anchorage provided by a privately owned homestead”.²¹⁹ In addition, even in the world of automobiles, there are differentiated brands and categories, as luxury brands like Porsche and Hummer are a symbol of high social status and wealth.

fabulous riches of coal and iron, of silver and gold, of copper and oil, and other things of which for the most part the savages neither felt the need nor knew the use.”²²¹

In the early times of development, Americans held the opinion that the bigger the country was, the more it could achieve. “Like poker chips, his money measured his skill and success in business, and so, again like poker chips, the rising figures of population and Chamber of Commerce statistics measured his success in foresight and struggle in another way. Size, like wealth, came to be a mere symbol of

“success,” and the sense of qualitative values was lost in the quantitative, the spiritual in the material.”²²² The quickest way to build a bigger country was of course that of continuous population growth. The more people moving to and settling down in America, the stronger and safer the community would be. As Adams argued,

“from the very beginning, the quantitative measure of value assumed a definite place in the American mentality…But for the first comers to America there was no chance to get ahead unless others came also, by birth or immigration…All motives – safety, profit, social intercourse, educational opportunities, everything – led the Americans to watch mounting figures of population growth with an eye to all that made life richer and pleasanter.”²²³

And, of course, given the stress laid on relative wealth (as seen previously), the first immigrants would enjoy having more recent comers to compare themselves to so as to feel their own superiority. Since Europeans immigrated to America in the seventeenth century, the States has been considered to be the land of hope, dreams and opportunity. In order to achieve these dreams, one had to choose an initial goal to aim for, and “in a land of unlimited opportunity, it was much easier to make things bigger than to make them better, and in working for bigness first we came to a great extent to forget the ultimate purpose of humane value.”²²⁴

Historically, the USA came into existence as a diverse immigrant society. The

221 Adams,James Truslow 1941:6 222 Adams,James Truslow 1941:216 223 Adams,James Truslow 1941:215 224 Adams,James Truslow 1941:217

population is composed of various ethnic groups. The eastern and southern Europeans immigrated to the land in the late nineteen century. Asians and Latin Americans made up another immigration peak in the early twentieth century. During some of the peak years of immigration in the early 1900s, about 1 million immigrants arrived annually, which was more than 1% of the total U.S. population at this time.

As a percentage of the total population, the percent of foreign-born residents fluctuated from 13% to 14% during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913).²²⁵ Therefore, to some extent, American demography is rooted in immigration, and immigrants still contribute to the contemporary diversity of American society.

The new rising cities appealed to a large number of immigrants from backward areas for the greater employment opportunities they offered. As a golden land of opportunity, America attracted millions of immigrants from abroad. “In the year 1907 alone, for example, 1,285,349 immigrants entered the United States, a number almost equal to the total population of the English colonies in America in 1720. From 1904 to 1914, more than 10 million Europeans entered this country, almost three times the population of the United States in 1788.”²²⁶

This increasing amount of European immigrants was certainly not the end of the story, and domestic migration took place within the nation. From 1910 to 1930, 1.75 million African Americans migrated from the Southern United States to the North, Midwest and West, seeking better job opportunities in industrial cities. From 1960 to 1970 there was a second Great Migration, when people moved from Texas to California due to an industrial boom there. However, in the era of New Migration (1995-2000), the direction was the other way around. People were going back to Texas or Maryland because of the increasing number of good jobs and improving race relations. The population shifted from the older agricultural areas to regions which offered industrial advantages, such as iron or coal deposits, water power, good harbors, or strategic railroad locations. As the result of this demographic

225 Hirschman Charles, Perez Daniel, Anthony, p386 In the early 19th century, European immigrants were only a small proportion of the whole when compared with the number after the mid-century. Until 1880, European immigrants exceeded the number of African Americans.

226 Barnes, Harry Elmer & Ruede,Oreen Morris & Ferguson,Robert Harry1942: 31

migration, the United States of America is now a highly urbanized nation. According to the demographic statistic report of the United Nation, 24.9 million people live in cities in the year of 2007, whereas only 5.69 million live in rural areas. The percentage of urbanization is up to 81.4%.²²⁷

For many, the adjustment to urban life was hard. A new term was coined to describe the health conditions of city dwellers: the diseases of civilization. Crowded city life replaced the stillness of the countryside, and people started to suffer from much more stress and pressure. Besides, as the infrastructure developed more slowly than the automobile industry there were massive traffic jams in all the major cities during peak hours. As Barnes argued of the social problems caused by urbanization, “The shape of the city has encouraged a spirit of superficiality, haste, and nervous tension.

The concentration of population has increased the problems of traffic and transportation, especially since the coming of the automobile. Even the development of suburban areas has not solved the transportation problem because it only increases congestion in cities during working and shopping hours.”²²⁸

American entrepreneurialism, creativity, and hard work have produced tremendous wealth. Yet the gap between rich and poor in America is widening. The United States has the greatest concentration of wealth, the greatest income inequality, and the highest poverty rates in the advanced industrial world. Moreover, the gap between rich and poor has been increasing for the past forty years. CNN reports that:

“In the early 1960s, the top 1 percent of households in terms of net worth held 125 times the median wealth in the United States. Today, that gap has grown to 190 times. The top 20 percent of wealth-holding households, meanwhile, held 15 times the overall median wealth in the early 1960s. By 2004, that gap had grown to 23 times.”²²⁹

National wealth has increased, and those in the top income bracket take the largest share of about 33 percent. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security data, executives and other highly-paid professionals now receive more than

227 World Urbanization Prospects, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Feburary 2008 228 Barnes, Harry Elmer & Ruede,Oreen Morris & Ferguson,Robert Harry1942: 31

229 Sahadi, Jeanne, Wealth Gap Widens,August 29 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/29/news/economy/wealth_gap/

one-third of all pay in the United States.

Having examined the fundamental American values and ideology, the film images shall be first analyzed from this perspective: how American values have influenced the selection of film characters and the storyline. The whole film will be divided into units: exposition, the stories of Mrs. Liao, Sun Feng, Xiaocui, Jinyang, Yang Fuzi, Vicent Luo, Huahan, Eliza & Zhuli. Within each unit, we shall analyze images / sequences in relation to both American values and historical Western images of China.

CHAPTER 5